giflossy

It sounds like he wants to make it illegal on the AppStore: > Permission is granted to copy, distribute, or alter Gifsicle, whole or in part, as long as source code copyright notices are kept intact, with the following restriction: Developers or distributors who plan to use Gifsicle code, whole or in part, in a product whose source code will not be made available to the end user -- more precisely, in a context which would violate the GPL -- MUST contact the author and obtain permission before doing so. - https://github.com/kornelski/giflossy#copyrightlicense

What would be really cool is if ffmpeg/avconv gained the ability to create lossy LZW GIFs, like in this tool: https://github.com/pornel/giflossy

Careful, your script and one liner generates a whopping 1.5mb file for a 3s movie. While gifify generates a 1mb file for a 800 px wide, 20s screencast. https://github.com/pornel/giflossy helps a lot, and works with unix pipes too, you can try it. Optimized! :) Also, gifify has lots of options like compression, resizing, speed, colors.. Of course, in the end, it's only a wrapper to ffmpeg - convert - gifsicle (giflossy). But it helps a lot in achieving MOVIE -> GIF. In a command line way or programmatic way (i.e., you can write a server that uses it and stream gifs to the client).

That's cool. Have you tried to make GIF compression lossy? The idea is that when looking for longest match in the dictionary you don't match colors exactly, but instead allow some difference. That can reduce file size by 20-30% (here's my take on it in C: https://github.com/pornel/giflossy/commit/5a9adbc0feb899a228...) Another optimization is to set pixels that are similar between frames to transparent color. That sometimes massively improves quality, as you only generate palette for part of the image (so the palette is better) and several frames overlaid together may give more than 256 colors.

LZW compression is primitive. Even in simplest case of all transparent pixels it can only do "repeat previous pattern and add 1 pixel to it" and has to start over every 4K repetitions. But it's also easy to hack! I've developed lossy GIF compressor: http://pornel.net/lossygif it's still worse than PNG, but would be awesome for animations. Anyone wants to help? https://github.com/pornel/giflossy/